by Lorin Stein
Are they translations? Are they by Flaubert? Are they by Davis? “Ten Stories” gives no clear indication of where Flaubert ends and Davis begins, or of how each story connects to the others, or is meant to. The cycle is both intimate and distanced. It deals in oppositions, cold and warm, black and white, tame and wild. It demonstrates compassion by an unfussed analysis of brutality. It examines several kinds of leave-taking: from the everyday journeying we do away from the beloved, all the way to the final separation of the grave.
Random juxtapositions resonate: connections appear as if by themselves. The beginning of “Ten Stories” announces a reversal of expectations, class, history. By the ending, love and loss have bloomed at the center of desolation. The sureness of arrangement (especially the placement of the next-to-last piece, “The Exhibition”) shows a deep editorial instinct at work.
“I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another.” In this story of stories told by someone else, no journey is solo, because telling itself is revealed as a communal form, a communal act.
Lydia Davis
Ten Stories from Flaubert
THE COOK’S LESSON
Today I have learned a great lesson; our cook was my teacher. She is twenty-five years old and she’s French. I discovered that she does not know that Louis-Philippe is no longer king of France and we now have a republic. And yet it has been five years since he left the throne. She said the fact that he is no longer king simply does not interest her in the least—those were her words.
And I think of myself as an intelligent man! But compared to her I’m an imbecile.
AFTER YOU LEFT
You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other.
Well, I was very sad; it had been so lovely. When I saw your back disappear into the train compartment, I went up on the bridge to watch your train pass under me. That was all I saw; you were inside it! I looked after it as long as I could, and I listened to it. In the other direction, toward Rouen, the sky was red and striped with broad bands of purple. The sky would be long dark by the time I reached Rouen and you reached Paris. I lit another cigar. For a while I paced back and forth. Then, because I felt so numb and tired, I went into a café across the street and drank a glass of kirsch.
My train came into the station, heading in the opposite direction from yours. In the compartment, I met a man I knew from my schooldays. We talked for a long time, almost all the way back to Rouen.
When I arrived, Louis was there to meet me, as we had planned, but my mother hadn’t sent the carriage to take us home. We waited for a while, and then, by moonlight, we walked across the bridge and through the port. In that part of town there are two places where we could hire a hackney cab.
At the second place, the people live in an old church. It was dark. We knocked and woke the woman, who came to the door in her nightcap. Imagine the scene, in the middle of the night, with the interior of that old church behind her—her jaws gaping in a yawn; a candle burning; the lace shawl she wore hanging down below her hips. The horse had to be harnessed, of course. The breeching band had broken, and we waited while they mended it with a piece of rope.
On the way home, I told Louis about my old school friend, who is his old school friend too. I told him how you and I had spent our time together. Out the window, the moon was shining on the river. I remembered another journey home late at night by moonlight. I described it to Louis: There was deep snow on the ground. I was in a sleigh, wearing my red wool hat and wrapped in my fur cloak. I had lost my boots that day, on my way to see an exhibition of savages from Africa. All the windows were open, and I was smoking my pipe. The river was dark. The trees were dark. The moon shone on the fields of snow: they looked as smooth as satin. The snow-covered houses looked like little while bears curled up asleep. I imagined that I was in the Russian steppe. I thought I could hear reindeer snorting in the mist, I thought I could see a pack of wolves leaping up at the back of the sleigh. The eyes of the wolves were shining like coals on both sides of the road.
When at last we reached home, it was one in the morning. I wanted to organize my work table before I went to bed. Out my study window, the moon was still shining—on the water, on the tow path, and, close to the house, on the tulip tree by my window. When I was done, Louis went off to his room and I went off to mine.
THE VISIT TO THE DENTIST
Last week I went to the dentist, thinking he was going to pull my tooth. He said it would be better to wait and see if the pain subsided.
Well, the pain did not subside—I was in agony and running a fever. So yesterday I went to have it pulled. On my way to see him, I had to cross the old market-place where they used to execute people, not so long ago. I remembered that when I was only six or seven years old, returning home from school one day, I crossed the square after an execution had taken place. The guillotine was there. I saw fresh blood on the paving stones. They were carrying away the basket.
Last night I thought about how I had entered the square on my way to the dentist dreading what was about to happen to me, and how, in the same way, those people condemned to death also used to enter that square dreading what was about to happen to them—though it was worse for them.
When I fell asleep I dreamed about the guillotine; the strange thing was that my little niece, who sleeps downstairs, also dreamed about a guillotine, though I hadn’t said anything to her about it. I wonder if thoughts are fluid, and flow downward, from one person to another, within the same house.
POUCHET’S WIFE
Tomorrow I will be going into Rouen for a funeral. Madame Pouchet, the wife of a doctor, died the day before in the street. She was on horseback, riding with her husband; she had a stroke and fell from the horse. I’ve been told I don’t have much compassion for other people, but in this case, I am very sad. Pouchet is a good man, though completely deaf and by nature not very cheerful. He doesn’t see patients, but works in zoology. His wife was a pretty Englishwoman with a pleasant manner, who helped him a good deal in his work. She made drawings for him and read his proofs; they went on trips together; she was a real companion. He loved her very much and will be devastated by his loss. Louis lives across the street from them. He happened to see the carriage that brought her home, and her son lifting her out; there was a handkerchief over her face. Just as she was being carried like that into the house, feet first, an errand boy came up. He was delivering a large bouquet of flowers she had ordered that morning. O Shakespeare!
THE FUNERAL
I went to Pouchet’s wife’s funeral yesterday. As I watched poor Pouchet, who stood there bending and swaying with grief like a stalk of grass in the wind, some fellows near me began talking about their orchards: they were comparing the girths of the young fruit trees. Then a man next to me asked me about the Middle East. He wanted to know whether there were any museums in Egypt. He asked me: “What is the condition of their public libraries?” The priest standing over the hole was speaking French, not Latin, because the service was a Protestant one. The gentleman beside me approved, then made some slighting remarks about Catholicism. Meanwhile, there was poor Pouchet standing forlornly in front of us.
We writers may think we invent too much—but reality is worse every time!
THE COACHMAN AND THE WORM
A former servant of ours, a pathetic fellow, is now the driver of a hackney cab—you’ll probably remember how he married the daughter of that porter who was awarded a prestigious prize at the same time that his wife was being sentenced to penal servitude for theft, whereas he, the porter, was actually the thief. In any case, this unfortunate man Tolet, our former servant, has, or thinks he has, a tapeworm inside him. He talks about it as though it were a living person who communicates with him and tells him what it wants, and when Tolet is talking to you, the word he always refers to this creature inside him. Sometimes Tolet has a sudden urge and attributes it to the tapeworm: “He wants it,” he says—and right away Tolet obeys. Lately he want
ed to eat some fresh white rolls; another time he had to have some white wine, but the next day he was outraged because he wasn’t given red.
The poor man has by now lowered himself, in his own eyes, to the same level as the tapeworm; they are equals waging a fierce battle for dominance. He said to my sister-in-law lately, “That creature has it in for me; it’s a battle of wills, you see; he’s forcing me to do what he likes. But I’ll have my revenge. Only one of us will be left alive.” Well, the man is the one who will be left alive, or, rather, not for long, because, in order to kill the worm and be rid of it, he recently swallowed a bottle of vitriol and is at this very moment dying. I wonder if you can see the true depths of this story.
What a strange thing it is—the human brain!
THE EXECUTION
Here is another story about our compassion. In a village not far from here, a young man murdered a banker and his wife, then raped the servant girl and drank all the wine in the cellar. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed. Well, there was such interest in seeing this peculiar fellow die on the guillotine that people came from all over the countryside the night before—more than ten thousand of them. There were such crowds that the bakeries ran out of bread. And because the inns were full, people spent the night outside: to see this man die, they slept in the snow.
And we shake our heads over the Roman gladiators. Oh charlatans!
THE CHAIRS
Louis has been in the church in Mantes looking at the chairs. He has been looking at them very closely. He wants to learn as much as he can about the people from looking at their chairs, he says. He started with the chair of a woman he calls Madame Fricotte. Maybe her name was written on the back of the chair. She must be very stout he says—the seat of the chair has a deep hollow in it, and the prayer stool has been reinforced in a couple of places. Her husband may be a notary, because the prayer stool is upholstered in red velvet with brass tacks. Or, he thinks, the woman may be a widow, because there is no chair belonging to Monsieur Fricotte—unless he’s an atheist. In fact, perhaps Madame Fricotte, if she is a widow, is looking for another husband, since the back of her chair is heavily stained with hair dye.
THE EXHIBITION
Yesterday, in the deep snow, I went to an exhibition of savages that had come here from La Havre. They were Kaffirs. The poor negroes, and their manager too, looked as if they were dying of hunger.
You paid a few pennies to get into the exhibition. It was in a miserable smoke-filled room up several flights of stairs. It was not well attended—seven or eight fellows in work clothes sat here and there in the rows of chairs. We waited for some time. Then a sort of wild beast appeared wearing a tiger skin on his back and uttering harsh cries. A few more followed him into the room—there were four altogether. They got up on a platform and crouched around a stew pot. Hideous and splendid at the same time, they were covered with amulets and tattoos, as thin as skeletons, their skin the color of my well-seasoned old pipe; their faces were flat, their teeth white, their eyes large, their expressions desperately sad, astonished, and brutalized. The twilight outside the windows, and the snow whitening the rooftops across the street, cast a gray pall over them. I felt as though I were seeing the first men on earth—as though they had just come into existence and were creeping about with the toads and the crocodiles.
Then one of them, an old woman, noticed me and came into the audience where I was sitting—she had, it seems, taken a sudden liking to me. She said some things to me—affectionate things, as far as I could tell. Then she tried to kiss me. The audience watched in surprise. For a quarter of an hour I stayed there in my seat listening to her long declaration of love. I asked their manager several times what she was saying, but he couldn’t translate any of it.
Though he claimed they knew a little English, they didn’t seem to understand a word, because after the show came to an end, at last—to my relief—I asked them a few questions and they couldn’t answer. I was glad to leave that dismal place and go back out into the snow, though I had lost my boots somewhere.
What is it that makes me so attractive to cretins, madmen, idiots, and savages? Do those poor creatures sense a kind of sympathy in me? Do they feel some sort of bond between us? It is infallible. It happened with the cretins of Valais, the madmen of Cairo, the monks of upper Egypt—they all persecuted me with their declarations of love!
Later, I heard that after this exhibition of savages, their manager abandoned them. They had been in Rouen for nearly two months by then, first on the boulevard Beauvoisin, then in the Grande Rue, where I saw them. When he left, they were living in a shabby little hotel in the Rue de la Vicomté. Their only recourse was to take their case to the English consul—I don’t know how they made themselves understood. But the consul paid their debts—four hundred francs to the hotel—and then put them on the train for Paris. They had an engagement there—it was to be their Paris debut.
MY SCHOOL FRIEND
Last Sunday I went to the Botanical Gardens. There, in the Trianon Park, is where that strange Englishman Calvert used to live. He grew roses and shipped them to England. He had a collection of rare dahlias. He also had a daughter who used to fool around with an old schoolmate of mine named Barbelet. Because of her, Barbelet killed himself. He was seventeen. He shot himself with a pistol. I walked across a sandy stretch of ground in the high wind, and I saw Calvert’s house, where the daughter used to live. Where is she now? They’ve put up a greenhouse near it, with palm trees, and a lecture hall where gardeners can learn about budding, grafting, pruning, and training—everything they need to know to maintain a fruit tree! Who thinks about Barbelet anymore—so in love with that English girl? Who remembers my passionate friend?
Issue 194, 2010
Wells Tower
on
Evan S. Connell’s The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge
How does this little story of India Bridge, marooned in her mannerly universe where not much happens, inflict a vaster hurt than the cirrhotic, erotic mayhem you find in nearly every other fictional study of Fedora Age malaise? Cheever’s people were at liberty to vent generational anguish with smashed crockery and marriages. Not so in Mrs. Bridge’s world, where the wisdom of Emily Post seems to operate as Newtonian law. Glassware is unshatterable on country club row. Conventional narrative physics—dramatic momentum, conflict, arc—slow, shrink, fizzle under the atmospherics that pressurize the habitat of Mrs. Bridge. In the vacuum of Kansas City, no one can hear you scream.
Its fragmentary structure is the story’s lonely soul. Extended through the pair of brilliant novels (Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge) prefigured here, Connell’s mosaic tile vignettes are the fuel cells of the portrait’s desolating power. The transformative incident, the life-altering epiphany can’t happen on Mrs. Bridge’s diffident planet, where existence is confined to minor moments. In aggregate, these miniatures demand from the reader a unique sort of sympathy. It’s a wholly original sorrow we feel for a woman who, when gunmen raid a cocktail party, reflects not at all on her brush with death; only that one of the bandits lacked a necktie, and the diamond ring stolen from Mrs. Noel Johnson was, embarrassingly, false.
Evan S. Connell
The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge
PARKING
The black Lincoln that Mr. Bridge gave her on her 47th birthday was a size too long and she drove it as cautiously as she might have driven a locomotive. People were always blowing their horns at her or turning their heads to stare when they went by. The Lincoln was set to idle too slowly and in consequence the engine sometimes died when she pulled up at an intersection, but as her husband never used the Lincoln and she herself assumed it was just one of those things about automobiles, the idling speed was never adjusted. Often she would delay a line of cars while she pressed the starter button either too long or not long enough. Knowing she was not expert she was always quite apologetic when something unfortunate happened, and did her best to keep out of everyone’s way. She changed into secon
d gear at the beginning of any hill and let herself down the far side much more slowly than necessary.
Usually she parked in a downtown garage where Mr. Bridge rented a stall for her. She had only to honk at the enormous doors, which would then trundle open, and coast on inside where an attendant would greet her by name, help her out, and then park the formidable machine. But in the country club district she parked on the street, and if there were diagonal stripes she did very well, but if parking was parallel she had trouble judging her distance from the curb and would have to get out and walk around to look, then get back in and try again. The Lincoln’s seat was so soft and Mrs. Bridge so short that she had to sit very erect in order to see what was happening ahead of her. She drove with arms thrust forward and gloved hands tightly on the large wheel, her feet just able to depress the pedals all the way. She never had serious accidents but was often seen here and there being talked to by patrolmen. These patrolmen never did anything partly because they saw immediately that it would not do to arrest her, and partly because they could tell she was trying to do everything the way it should be done.
When parking on the street it embarrassed her to have people watch, yet there always seemed to be someone at the bus stop or lounging in a doorway with nothing to do but stare while she struggled with the wheel and started jerkily backward. Sometimes, however, there would be a nice man who, seeing her difficulty, would come around and tip his hat and ask if he might help.
